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To Bottle Pears Pink

Pears preserved in a slightly acidulated syrup and colored pink with cochineal, then bottled and boiled.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Pear and syrup work together. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 254 recipes. Both carry ethanol, which smells alcoholic, ethereal. The science ↓

To Bottle Pears Pink

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the pears

  1. Refresh the pears in two separate cold waters and drain them on a sieve.

  2. Add just enough prepared cochineal when parboiling the pears.

Fill and seal

  1. Fill the bottles carefully and neatly without pressure.

  2. Add prepared cochineal to the syrup for a delicate pink tinge.

  3. Cork the bottles and tie them down.

Cook

  1. Boil for 15 minutes.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Pear + syruptop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together254 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Pears
Form the main body of the dish and take up the colour and syrup as they cook.
Prepared cochineal
Gives the pink colour, which builds quickly and is hard to reduce once absorbed.
Syrup
Sweetens the pears and keeps them moist while they cook in the bottles.

The step that matters

Add just enough prepared cochineal when parboiling the pears. Cochineal colour builds quickly and cannot be easily removed, so too much turns the pink harsh. Adding a small amount during parboiling lets the pears take up an even, delicate tint.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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